My favorite Encyclopedia Brown stories were the ones where he wasn’t solving mysteries, but where he was fooling the other children.
For example (and this is from memory so the details may be off), Brown wanted to make some money off the other children by running a gambling game, but he knew that he’d get in major trouble if he were caught doing such a thing. He asked an authority figure if he could just run a game where children paid money to win a toy randomly chosen by a spinner, and got (grudging) approval.
Then came his nifty idea: he’d only buy a few toys before the game started, so that he’d quickly run out. Once one of the children won an toy he had ran out of, he’d (after some hesitation for show) give them the amount of money it would take to buy that toy at the store, then make them “promise” that they’d go and spend the money on the toy. He knew that most of the children would stay and put the money right back into the game (thus turning it into real gambling), but he had established a veneer of plausible deniability; how could he know if they were spending from their own initial pocket money or from money they had won back?
I don’t know how much of an example of rationalism that is, but I still think it’s valuable for children to learn to think in terms of someone trying to game a system, as a third option beyond following the system strictly or breaking it outright. It’s useful later on when they find themselves needing to game systems, or to build systems that are hard to game.
I think you may be thinking of The Great Brain, not Encyclopedia Brown, there. Encyclopedia Brown was a boy of upstanding moral character, which meant The Great Brain was more fun to read.
My favorite Encyclopedia Brown stories were the ones where he wasn’t solving mysteries, but where he was fooling the other children.
For example (and this is from memory so the details may be off), Brown wanted to make some money off the other children by running a gambling game, but he knew that he’d get in major trouble if he were caught doing such a thing. He asked an authority figure if he could just run a game where children paid money to win a toy randomly chosen by a spinner, and got (grudging) approval.
Then came his nifty idea: he’d only buy a few toys before the game started, so that he’d quickly run out. Once one of the children won an toy he had ran out of, he’d (after some hesitation for show) give them the amount of money it would take to buy that toy at the store, then make them “promise” that they’d go and spend the money on the toy. He knew that most of the children would stay and put the money right back into the game (thus turning it into real gambling), but he had established a veneer of plausible deniability; how could he know if they were spending from their own initial pocket money or from money they had won back?
I don’t know how much of an example of rationalism that is, but I still think it’s valuable for children to learn to think in terms of someone trying to game a system, as a third option beyond following the system strictly or breaking it outright. It’s useful later on when they find themselves needing to game systems, or to build systems that are hard to game.
I think you may be thinking of The Great Brain, not Encyclopedia Brown, there. Encyclopedia Brown was a boy of upstanding moral character, which meant The Great Brain was more fun to read.
Perhaps you’re right, it’s been a while since I read those books.